France Needs Hollande to Keep His Word on Economic ‘Offensive’

by Charles Sizemore | May 20, 2013 10:47 am

The numbers came in last week: France is in recession again, for the third time in five years. A triple-dip recession? Sacre bleu!

There is some debate[1] as to whether this is a double-dip or a triple-dip recession; that mini-recession in 2012 was questionable. But there is no escaping the broader point here. France has a serious growth problem, and so does most of the rest of Europe.

As a block, the eurozone’s economy has been shrinking for six consecutive quarters, and the unemployment rate has crept up to 12.1%. Ever the country to outdo its neighbors, Italy has seen its economy shrink for seven quarters in a row. Even the German economy — the engine that is supposed to be driving the rest of the continent — is showing weakness, growing at a pitiful 0.1%.

Years of policy paralysis and a broken banking system have taken their toll, grinding the European economy to a halt.

The upside? Well, to start, French President Francois Hollande has promised an “offensive” to bring “more growth and less austerity.”

Wow, that’s brilliant. Why didn’t anyone think of that before? Clearly, all Europe needs to get out of its on-again/off-again, five-year recession was for the President of France to go on an offensive.

Mr. Hollande’s impotent pronouncements about “offensives” aside, serious pressure is mounting on France to reform its labor markets and relax some of the bureaucracy that makes doing business in France so miserably difficult.

But because Hollande is a man of the left, he has a decent chance of forcing the reforms, for the same reason a right-winger like Richard Nixon was able to normalize relations with Red China: When someone reaches that far across the political fence, there must be a very good reason for it.

Is Hollande up to the task? We’ll see. But he is at least starting to say the right things, such as indicating that French workers would have to work longer in order to qualify for their pensions. Let’s hope he’s serious. The world economy needs a strong Europe, and Europe needs a strong France.

The broader issue of Europe’s broken banking system also has some promising developments. In the “bad news is good news” world of central bank policy, the European Central Bank promised to keep its loose monetary policy in place for “quite a long time.”

As John Maynard Keynes pointed out decades ago, stimulative monetary policy in the absence of real aggregate demand is akin to “pushing on a string” — it doesn’t do much. That is basically where we are today. Credit is being made available, but it’s not making its way into the real economy or having much of an effect.

Part of this is because of lack of demand, but certainly not all. Small and medium-sized companies in Spain and Italy — the companies most needed to hire new employees and get the economy moving again — are being starved of capital because the funds that the ECB are making available aren’t flowing through the local banking systems and into their treasuries.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and that is exactly what ECB President Mario Draghi has promised to deliver. Draghi has publicly suggested lowering the deposit rate than the ECB pays on bank deposits to below zero, meaning that the ECB would effectively be taxing Europe’s banks for not lending.

Will it spur the banks to lend to one another … and to the corporate borrowers that need the funds the most? We shall see. But the ECB’s willingness to go to extreme means to shock the system out of stasis is a major positive.

And finally, we come to Germany. Germany’s low growth rate is disturbing, but all of the news on that front isn’t bad. The low overall growth was affected by low levels of investments and masked a strong performance by German consumers, who have been criticized throughout the crisis for being too frugal.

The situation in Europe looks bad, but I continue to believe that things are moving in the right direction there, even if slowly and in fits and starts. In the meantime, I continue to be bullish on European equities. They tend to have better exposure to emerging markets than their American counterparts and particularly to the emerging markets I find most promising, such as Africa.

European equities are also attractively priced at the moment. The iShares MSCI France ETF (EWQ[2]) trades for just 12 times earnings and is dominated by some real gems, including fashion powerhouse LVMH Moet Hennessey Louis Vuitton (LVMUY[3]), food products company Danone (DANOY[4]) and international oil major Total (TOT[5]), among others.

If you believe, as I do, that Europe will muddle through this crisis intact, then keeping an allocation to European shares makes sense at current prices. I expect most major European indices to outperform their first-world rivals in North American and Japan over the next five years.

Charles Lewis Sizemore, CFA, is the chief investment officer of the investment firm Sizemore Capital Management. As of this writing, Sizemore Capital was long EWQ and LVMUY. Click here[6] to receive his FREE 8-part investing series that will not only show you which sectors will soar but also which stocks will deliver the highest returns. The series starts November 5 and includes a FREE copy of his 2014 Macro Trend Profit Report.